by Carol Morley
*
Mickey unfolded the ripped-out page from the Manchester Evening News and passed it to me.
Homeless Man Sleeps in Stolen Car.
I hurried through the article and then went back to the beginning and slowly read it again. Mickey’s dad had been arrested for stealing a car and driving it under the influence. He said he had taken the car to sleep in, as he had been homeless since the break-up of his marriage. It even mentioned that he was the father of two children.
‘No one’ll work out it’s yer dad,’ I said.
‘Yer won’t go tellin’?’
‘Cross me heart, I won’t.’
Mickey took the page back and folded it carefully along the grooves that proved she must have looked at it over and over again. I felt relieved that my dad had never made it to the papers.
To cheer Mickey up, I lifted the lid on her record player, which had been given to her by her mum’s new boyfriend – a good-looking TV salesman who was never around long enough for me to take notes. I put the needle onto our favourite track from Jilted John’s album True Love Stories, which we had bought for the cash deposit on the empty pop bottles we’d collected. The music vibrated from the speaker and we sat on the edge of the bed and sang along to a song about discos and dancing and kisses.
We played it again and again. I hoped that the music would never stop. I was anxious about going to bed, as we usually stripped down to our bras and knickers, and I was wearing a bra that belonged to Mickey’s mum. I had stolen it from the airing cupboard, as the bras that had been passed down to me didn’t fit any more, and I was scared that Mickey would realise.
Mickey turned the overhead light off and stripped to her underwear and slipped under the covers. The streetlights glowed through the net curtain. The room was patterned with shadow and light. I slowly took my skirt off. Mickey stared at the faded nylon angel on the front of my knickers as I got into bed next to her, still wearing my jumper.
‘When I babysat for next door I looked in bedroom and she had a drawer full of knickers,’ Mickey said. ‘Stuffed it were. Me nan says three pairs is enough. One to wear, one fer wash and one just in case.’
‘My mum says that,’ I said. It wasn’t true, but I thought it sounded a good thing to say, seeing as I only had three pairs.
‘I know this lad startin’ on market on knicker stall. I bet he’ll let us pinch a few.’
I pulled up the blanket and started to fantasise about having a lot of knickers.
‘Aren’t yer gonna take your top off?’ Mickey asked.
‘I’m cold,’ I lied.
‘But it’s dead warm yer moron.’
Mickey flung back the blanket. I felt sick. I peeled my jumper off, taking as much time as possible.
‘Take yer bra off,’ she whispered.
She was taking her mother’s bra back.
Under the covers I unhooked the bra and took it off and handed it to her. She flung it aside. Then she took her own bra off and tossed it across the room.
Mickey looked down at me and smiled and the stray light hit her small straight milky teeth.
‘Let me see,’ she said, and pulled the ancient blanket down to look. I braced myself and let her.
Thin shadows from her long eyelashes gently marked her cheeks. Why did she want to see what lay under her mother’s bra? I looked down at her small swellings and was envious.
Mickey lay on her back and pulled the blanket over us and we linked arms like we always did before we drifted to sleep. I prayed that it would be the night I dreamed of Dad.
Instead I dreamed that Mickey’s mother’s bra was on a washing line, blowing to and fro in a fierce wind.
I woke up. The streetlights must have automatically turned off because it was dark.
‘Ann,’ Mickey whispered. I stopped breathing. I was lying on my front. Her hand slipped forwards, cupping the gusset of my angel knickers.
Her breath grazed my shoulder as I pretended to be asleep. She was waiting for something.
Her hand stayed still. What would happen if she knew I was awake? She hovered for a while before taking her hand away.
*
The rash appeared a few days later. I couldn’t stop scratching it. Mum said it was a waste of time going to see a doctor, as they weren’t fit to diagnose anything and I knew she had Dad on her mind – doctors hadn’t done anything for him. When the rash got worse I sneaked to the GP’s surgery without Mum knowing.
The doctor took a quick look at the red lumps on my skin and smiled.
‘It’s scabies. You can get it from being close to other people and old blankets. A parasite. Very contagious. A little mite under your skin.’
Was it like a worm burrowing its way to my bones? The thought made me ill.
Back at home I spread the ointment over my skin. The doctor had told me that I would need someone to help me put it on my back, but there was no way anyone was seeing me naked, especially Mum.
Even though I was sure I had caught scabies from Mickey and her old blanket, I didn’t get a chance to discuss it with her. When I went back to school, our form teacher told us that Mickey had moved to the seaside town of Morecambe with her mother.
Mickey was gone.
I finished with my lad and started to go out with Mickey’s boyfriend, Matt the punk.
*
Matt was the first boy to finger me and I spent the whole time hoping I didn’t smell like fish. When he stopped he asked me to give him a heart on his stomach made out of lovebites. I liked the metallic taste of his blood in my mouth. Most of all I liked being his girlfriend and running my fingers through the hard shiny spikes of his bleached blond hair.
A few days later I phoned Matt and his mum answered the phone.
‘I want them lovebites to stop,’ she said.
A long static pause hung between us. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. Later, when I saw Matt, he said that his mum had called me gormless and that he didn’t want to go out with me any more.
‘Yer a bit of a slag anyway,’ he said.
I decided I definitely smelt like fish as I tensed my body and fisted my hands and thought of Mickey hiding her warts. One minute she was there, and the next she was gone. Just like Dad. I thought of waving him off in his car like everything was normal. How moronic was that? I should have known something was wrong. It seemed as though he had gone missing my whole life. I had cried before when he had disappeared, but he’d always come back. That last time, the time he never did come back, I had thought everything was going to be okay. He would be back home just like the other times.
How wrong I was.
I was wrong about everything and now I was a slag.
brynn
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she peers into the wardrobe mirror. She blames having children for the state she’s in. The weight clings to her no matter how little she eats. There are dark sags under her eyes, and a sharp line that connects her forehead to her nose but at least she isn’t very lined for her age and the weight means she doesn’t look stringy like some women.
She thinks of herself pregnant again. Her mother once said that when her own mother was about to give birth for the first time she thought the baby was going to come out of her belly button. She was shocked when the midwife told her that the baby was going to come out the same way it got in.
Maybe she has a headache coming on because she feels quite strange. She feels hot tears on her cheeks. She wonders if she should go back on the tranquillisers but can’t bear the idea of the doctor. Anyway, she is nothing like her husband was. His case was a serious case.
Reading an Agatha Christie would take her mind off things. Was Miss Marple thin or fat? Margaret Rutherford played her fat, but she was sure in the book she was thin.
She could become a detective herself, though by rights Miss Marple wasn’t a detective, she just seemed to be around murders a lot. What about moving to the country? Renting a little cottage and working in a library and writ
ing a book like Agatha Christie? Maybe she could join the police force but there is probably an age limit or a height limit, and really she doesn’t want to be a policewoman, though putting on the uniform every day would be quite nice.
He’d looked very handsome in his prison officer uniform when he’d worked at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. She wonders if working with those criminals had damaged his mind, but then again the prisoners who came to do the garden seemed very decent types really. Better than some people who’d never been in prison.
She stares at the ceiling and notices fine cracks. She may paint her bedroom blue and she’ll start her diet again at the weekend.
the cruellest month
‘Who knows the facts of life?’ asked our Science teacher. The entire class put their hands up. Mr Green looked relieved and asked us to write what we knew in our exercise books.
I decided to divide what I wrote under the usual headings of Method, Results and Conclusion. Method: A man and woman go to bed and the man puts his penis into the woman and releases seeds and blood. Result: the woman gets pregnant and nine months later a baby is born. Conclusion: Sex makes a baby. I chewed the end of my Biro and looked at Woody who was next to me and writing enthusiastically. Realising that there was more to the facts of life than I realised, I sneaked a look at Woody’s exercise book.
Woody had written: The man gets excited and his penis gets bigger and thicker and longer and this is called a hard on and then he inserts it into a woman and cums and lets sperm out. This was news to me. I had always thought that a man’s penis was the same size at all times and I couldn’t imagine how it could get bigger. I added it to my description, trying to suppress the image of Dad doing it with Mum and the air hostess.
Mr Green gave us back our books the following week.
‘I’ve had some laughs I must say. A lot of you have got some very peculiar notions.’
We waited for an explanation, but none came. Mr Green handed me my book and I opened it hoping to discover more, but there was nothing added to my description and he hadn’t crossed anything out either.
*
Our lessons at school were called periods, which was a word that haunted me. Lately I had put off going to the toilet for hours in case I found blood flowing uncontrollably from between my legs. The thought of it frightened me. I had first heard about periods when I was ten. The girl on toilet duty had drawn me inside a cubicle and had pointed down into the toilet. I was shocked to see blood in the bowl.
‘It’s got nowt to do with me,’ she said.
‘Was it an accident?’
‘It comes out yer fanny.’
‘Liar.’
‘Oh shut it, it’s dead true. It’s no skin off my nose if yer don’t believe me. It’s so yer can have babies or summat.’
I prayed that my blood would never arrive. I crossed my legs and hoped for the best. But even though I tried to will my periods never to happen, they did. It was a frosty, chilly morning the day I woke up and found blood on my sheet. I had no idea where the blood came from, or why I needed it but I knew it meant I could have babies, though I wasn’t sure exactly why. We hadn’t looked at things like that in Science. Mr Green told us very little about our insides apart from where our hearts were. He put his hand to his chest and suggested that the boys do the same to feel it beating, but not the girls – in case they accidently touched something else close by.
I didn’t want to tell Mum about the blood that had found its way out of me in the night, but I had to, I needed something to soak up the blood. She was in bed, asleep. I shook her gently awake. Her creased face sprang together in alarm.
‘I’ve started,’ I said.
She sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.
‘Oh, I should’ve thought. I’ve got nothing in. I’m sorry, love.’
She suggested that I fold up some toilet paper in my knickers till I got to school, which annoyed me because I could have thought of that. How could she be so unprepared? It was lucky that we weren’t down to newspaper strips that day.
At school, Matron crossed her arms and listened with a bored expression to my rambling about how I was using toilet paper and it was my first period. She interrupted by handing me a thick white spongy oblong.
‘Ten pence,’ she said.
It seemed a bit steep and I felt such a fool that I could probably have bought one from her without wittering an explanation.
Lucy checked out my skirt from behind and promised me that you couldn’t see the sanitary towel bulging out. The boys were always pinging my bra strap and I didn’t want them noticing the towel, too. The idea of that made me ill.
*
It was not just Mum who had given up work, apparently. Council workers across the country took part in strikes to fight for better wages and working conditions. I watched the images on television of unburied bodies and rats crawling over rubbish mountains as the gravediggers and bin men stayed off work and fought for their rights. Sometimes we couldn’t even watch TV because of all the power cuts.
The dinner ladies took strike action and pupils had to leave the school grounds during dinnertime as the teachers refused to break the strike and supervise us. If you lived far enough away you didn’t have to come back in for afternoon classes, so I never did return. Not that I ever headed home. I went to Woody’s house with him instead. His mum wasn’t there as she had run off and left Woody and his dad, who according to Woody was always at work, so that was one dad I didn’t get to study. Woody took every opportunity to study me though, and I spent the afternoons on my back on his bed, shivering with the cold and covered in goose bumps.
Woody never took his clothes off, but he stripped me of all mine. I asked him about his dad, while he was squeezing my mounds, wondering if he was checking if one was bigger than the other. I asked Woody if he was nervous that his dad would unexpectedly come back and find us, but he said his dad worked too far away for that to happen. I still hoped I would get to meet him, and give him the once-over at least. Eventually Woody told me that his mum had gone and left his dad because his dad was always picking up women. He described his dad’s various girlfriends in great detail as I watched his side-parted long fringe sway over his eyes, while his hot hands explored my body like I was a relief map.
His plump lips got plumper and redder as he sucked blood from my thighs and the pools of his black pupils enlarged. I spent afternoons suspended in his bedroom, calm and still on his single bed, beneath his polystyrene sky, asking him questions. Against my skin I felt the scratch of his dark grey school trousers and the brush of his tie. I felt a gentle stirring in my flesh, an invisible something. I tried to pinpoint his smell, to break it down, but I couldn’t.
What Woody did to me was our secret, or so I thought, until Norman, a boy in another class, told me he knew. I’m sure it was his revenge for the time he carved my name on his arm with a pencil sharpener blade and filled it in with Indian ink and I refused to let him kiss me. Norman said that he watched everything that Woody did to me because Woody would leave the back door unlocked so Norman could sneak in and climb the stairs to the landing. Had I ever noticed that the bedroom door was always ajar? That was because he, Norman, was always crouched behind it, watching, watching me naked.
I never went back to Woody’s house after that, so I never did meet his dad and I kept thinking of how I couldn’t get my name off Norman’s arm. It was there forever, carved out of flesh and blood.
between two lives
Shelley was in my class but she was so quiet and plain it never occurred to me to get to know her. And then her father died so I made friends with her because she was someone else with a dead dad. I really wanted to ask Shelley questions. How long had she known her dad had cancer? Had she been at his bedside when he died? If so, what did she say to him on his deathbed? How did she feel about him not being around? I never did ask her though. If I did she would want to find out the truth about how my dad had died. But I liked hanging around with her and bei
ng part of her dadless life.
Shelley now lived with her sister in their auntie’s attic and took me to visit her mum who couldn’t cope with her children living with her any more. Her mum’s bones jutted out through her jeans and T-shirt, and her face was flat and pallid. She had a shiny, red nose flecked with blackheads and she smelt of damp. Her lips looked as though they had been drawn on with crayon and were melting away.
Shelley’s mum drank lager from various open tins that were scattered about the lounge. She kept the curtains drawn. The hanging bulb cast gloomy shadows over the armchairs that crammed the room. I doubted many people came to sit on them. The room was carpeted with so many different sample squares of carpet that my eyes hurt trying to figure out all the patterns. There was a dartboard on the back of the door, both the board and the door pinned with holes.
I sat down in the armchair next to Shelley, who gave me a sideways look and a nervous smile. Her mum clutched a lager tin to her flat chest. ‘How could yer go and do that to me?’ she said.
‘If yer mean about Family Allowance I had to tell social worker yer was getting it,’ Shelley said. ‘Auntie gets it now. It’s the law Mam.’
Her mum snarled and threw her tin across the room. It hit the wall and bounced off, leaving a spray of beer. She rolled a dart between her fingers. Her bloodshot eyes swam in their sockets. I was ready to run but she lowered the dart and abruptly smiled at me. Her missing front tooth made her seem like a child and less scary. She held a dart in the air.
‘Let’s play.’